SOPHIA: HOW AND WHY THE FLAWED ETHICS OF INEQUALITY
DECEREBRATED GRECO-ROMAN CIVILIZATION. ENSLAVING AND
OPPRESSING OTHERS LED THE GREEK DEMOCRACIES AND THE
ROMAN REPUBLIC TO BE DEVOURED BY FASCISM, BRUTALITY,
AND STUPEFYING STUPIDITY.

Abstract: We breezily review the sociology of the
most advanced civilizations in the last 10,000 years
to explain why the Greek and Roman republics were so
ETHICALLY FLAWED, they caused the Dark Ages. Giant agricultural
empires were the most productive organizations for newly
invented biotechnology; they dominated civilization
for millennia as they put fascism to good use. But democracy
is more friendly to mental diversity, hence intelligence
and innovation. As technology became increasingly powerful,
democracy gained an increasing advantage over imperialism.
The natural antagonism between (fascist) empires and
democracies led both sides to use the ultimate weapon
of mass destruction: FASCISM. Fascism running out of
control led Greek national-democratism into self destruction,
by killing the very mentality of innovation which had
made Greece superior. GREEK FASCISM WAS FACILITATED
BY A CONFUSION BETWEEN FREEDOM AND DOMINATION OF OTHERS.
This led Athens, an arrogant democracy, to criminality
and catastrophe, as she tried to build an empire without
concentrating on the ethics of what she was doing. Greek
philosophy failed to throw any light on that ethical
crisis. Greek ethics celebrated virtue, but all we see
is people trying to dominate other people by force.
In Rome the same flawed ethical way to look at others
as OBJECTS OF DOMINATION TO ESTABLISH ONE'S FREEDOM,
was compounded by a drastic CLASS gap. The wealthiest
Romans used fascism to enslave the whole Mediterranean
area for their personal profit. The wars against Carthage
were the convenient device used by the wealthy to call
onto enough fascism from the Roman Senate to roll back,
and crush democracy in other nations, and then finally
in Rome, making the latter into a mindless giant. This
Roman contempt of the wealthy for the commons survives
in the West to this day. The ETHICS OF CONTEMPT FOR
PEOPLE BECAME THE ETHICS OF CONTEMPT FOR THOUGHT, and
one cannot run the most advanced civilization that way.
Civilization crashed. None of this happened by accident.
It happened because history is animated by immensely
complex laws which are highly non linear: individuals
can play a crucial role. Some (very) noble Romans nearly
succeeded to inflect history for the best (Gracchi,
Marius, Caesar). It would have been easier for those
politicians if some philosophy of EQUALITY had been
there first to guide them. There was none. Caesar had
to invent the concept of FRATERNITY for himself, by
himself. As we will see in another essay, it is a small
group of illiterate Germans, the Salii (Salian Franks)
who reconstructed the ethics of the West so that it
would NOT crash again in self contradiction. The ethics
of the Franks, led to the NAISSANCE of the successful
world civilization we know today. IT WAS NOT A RENAISSANCE.
The flawed Greco-Roman monster was not born again. America
would be well advised to learn and meditate all this,
as it seems sometimes determined to make history by
mimicking democratic Athens' atrocious and self destructive
behavior of 25 centuries ago, down to each single word
of each vicious sentence ("Either you are with us, or
you are against us").

THE LAST 10,000 YEARS: BIOTECHNOLOGY, HENCE HIGH
POPULATIONS, ARMIES, AND EMPIRES:

Large scale sociology did not exist for most of the
evolution of mankind. It evolved in the last 10,000
years, as the invention of biotechnology allowed humans
to evolve nutritious crops, making large scale food
production, and therefore, large human populations,
possible. This evolution did not entail cities right
away: in most of North America, for example, the itinerant
growing of corn allowed the apparition of large populations,
without cities. But in the most developed areas, cities,
hence politics, appeared. This philosophical evolution
predated all present day religions. POLITICS IS PRACTICAL
PHILOSOPHY. But it's also the result of some sort of
mathematically directed evolution. The advantage went
first to gigantic ensembles, the agricultural empires,
which blossomed on most continents as they organized
bioengineered agriculture. The empires were carefully
constructed to violate and use human psychobiology to
maximize food production (hence military capability).

WHY AGRICULTURE LED POST NEOLITHIC SOCIETIES TO USE
FASCISM ON A GIANT SCALE:

Agricultural societies were characterized by gigantism.
Their very gigantism allowed them to flourish. Whereas
it now takes a day to go around the whole planet, it
could take years to cross some of the vast imperial
expanses necessary to keep hungry savages away from
the agricultural centers. Fascism allowed agricultural
societies to appear, and be held together, with armies
of enslaved peasant feeding agricultural surpluses to
armies of soldiers protecting them, led by brutal aristocratic
elites. It was more efficient that way.

SLAVERY CAN BE IMPOSED ONLY THROUGH STRICT FASCISM:

Human beings are not made to be slaves, either literally,
or figuratively. One does not enslave the planet's top
predator easily. Prehistoric men were killers who evolved
in freedom, equality, fraternity, celebrating with the
occasional roasted enemy. Human beings domesticated
fire two million years ago, and it was not to let themselves
be domesticated, as the Greeks' Prometheus pointed out.
To hold such unruly creatures as human beings in a state
of slavery, one has to use the strongest means, and
that is what giant empires learned to do extremely well.

Fortunately for empire builders, carnivorous, savannah
dwelling primates have long evolved the psychobiological
reflex of fascism, as anyone who has confronted a baboon
troop knows. Successful empire builders learned to exploit
that psychobiological trait. How the killer ape kills,
when in the direst straights, was used to turn him into
an enthusiastic ant in an anthill of the willing.

Fascism is the psychobiological mechanism whereby
people unite behind the leader(s) in a fight to death
against the enemy by concentrating all their mental
powers on the fighting. In other words, carnivorous
social primates are natural Nazis. They will follow
in perfect, monomaniacal mental discipline and with
utmost ferocity, if tuned just right. Fascism has been
crucial to the ascent of killer apes, second only to
imagination and intelligence. Fascism was crucial in
the rise of agricultural civilization. Fascism was crucial
for the rise of Rome, which advertised the concept,
invented the semantics, and used it continually... until
its eastern remnant was smashed by the Franks (17 centuries
later: 1204 CE).

WHY DEMOCRACY APPEARED, MAKING FASCISM EVEN MORE DANGEROUS,
SINCE IT BECAME DEMOCRACY'S ULTIMATE WEAPON:

Trading between empires was economically advantageous
to all, and favored higher technology in transportation.
It made smaller elites rich and powerful (examples:
Crete, Tyr, the Greeks, the Celts, Carthage). Building
the ships allowed and required extreme trading, to gather
the building materials (such as metals), and extreme
imagination, to find the mental breakthroughs new technology
required.

The drawback of fascism is that, per definition, it
prevents mental diversity, hence maximum imagination.
Being at war, under orders, and in terror all the time,
is not conducive to the most elaborated thoughts. As
higher mental powers became necessary for higher technical
occupations, fascism became a hindrance. MAXIMUM POWER
BECAME MAXIMAL MENTAL POWER, MEANING MAXIMUM MENTAL
DIVERSITY.

Sea based powers armed with imagination, hence mental
freedom, such as Crete, or her heirs the Greeks, came
to dominate this new way of being human. Those democracies
were small, advanced, rich, and surrounded with large
empires. Some milder, freer empires understood they
needed the small inventive ones (Egypt traded with Crete).
Others did not (such as the hyperpower multinational
Persia was, after it conquered Egypt). Total war resulted,
as Persia tried to submit the Greeks, because submitting
others is what a hyperpower does. Both sides turned
to fascism: tiny Sparta threw the Persian ambassadors
down wells. Persia rose armies which numbered in the
millions, and invaded Greece.

Facing dreadful odds, the Greeks did not flinch, and
fought to death, in rare moments of total unity. Fascism
turned out to be a necessary condition for the defense
of democracy against non democratically based ... fascism.
There is no fury as a democracy fighting so hard for
survival that it has turned fascist. The Persians lost
their fleet, and then their army. 150 years later, they
would lose their entire empire.

From early republican Rome to modern France and USA,
the (Roman) fasces have since reminded all that the
demos, in spite of its diversity, can unite with the
strength of mass destruction (the ax in the fasces is
not a delicate weapon). Unfortunately for the Greeks
and Romans, something went very wrong, as the fascism
they had to use episodically alloyed itself durably
with the outrage of inequality they could have done
without:

THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD AS A SELF CONTRADICTORY ORGANIZATION
OF UNNATURAL BRUTALITY:

THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD WAS FLAWED. It harbored an inner,
deadly, contradiction. It spent most of its time suffering
from this fatal disease. Both the Greek and the Roman
societies were SLAVE SOCIETIES. A THIRD of the Roman
population was made of slaves. The most vigorous ones
(those in mines and agribusiness) died so fast they
had to be continuously replaced by fresh supplies.

There were many societies in the past, many were not
slave societies. Even a somewhat fascist empire such
as Egypt had few slaves. The very advanced democracy
of Crete was not a slave society (it was terminated
by the planet's most violent volcanic eruption in 20,000
years). One would have expected the most technology
advanced societies of the planet to be sociologically
advanced. They started thus (Etruscans, Ionian Greeks),
but evolved backwards. As time went by, Hellenistic
states started to look like the "Asia" they had conquered,
and Rome teemed with more and more slaves.

Being slave masters corrupted the minds of the Greeks,
and the minds of the Romans. Ironically, it led to the
global enslavement of both societies. Rome did not succumb
to the military of the Germans as much as to the militarization
of her own mind, which became too simple. In the sixth
century CE, the Roman empire was strong and wealthy
again, having reconquered nearly all, but for France
(where the Franks ruled in the name of the empire).
Still the people, the Greco-Roman people, was in chains,
and only one man, the emperor, decided all. No wonder,
disastrous decisions were taken, quickly resulting in
the destruction of most of civilization, from the Persian
Gulf to Iberia.

The Greco-Romans never cleaned up their own mess;
instead, it was the Franks who cleaned it up, as the
Greco-Roman world had fallen on its own sword. That
penultimate Romano-Christian military campaign, in the
sixth century CE, devastated most of the old empire,
and especially Rome and Italy; the last huge Roman war,
in the seventh century CE, made the bed of Islam by
ruining the Sassanids (Iran) and Constantinople, and
the Arabo-Roman garrisons guarding Arabia. All along
there was great oppression of the many by the few, perpetuated
by Roman Christianity and now Islam, both with their
emperors and caliphs, both revering slavery (as ordained
by God/Allah). The Franks changed all that.

SLAVERY IS COMPATIBLE NEITHER WITH DEMOCRACY NOR INTELLIGENCE:

Enslavement of man by man replaces the enslavement
of reasoning by man in a slave society. This is a deadly
contradiction with democracy. DEMOCRACY WAS EVOLVED
TO GIVE AN EDGE IN MENTAL POWER. In a slave society,
people are treated worse than animals, because animals
do not revolt by principle, whereas people do, so they
have to be treated worse than animals to be kept from
doing what they do naturally. Feeding and treating a
slave kindly, is not enough to keep the slave in working
order. One needs to go out, and kill people. EXTREME
SPITE FOR MAN IS MANDATORY IN A SLAVE SOCIETY. Cicero,
a Roman of exquisite humanity (for a Roman), once wrote
that, in a storm, one should throw a few slaves overboard,
to lighten the ship, rather than a good horse. It was
the LAW, the Roman law, to execute all slaves in a household
where a master had died suspiciously. Torture was preferred,
to conduct such executions, in the hope of learning
interesting things. The very definition of interesting
is changed, in a slave society, and does not become
conducive to higher knowledge.

In a slave society, the ambition is to master men,
not nature. Advanced knowledge of torture is preferred
to advanced knowledge of anything else, so the masters
themselves end up as brutal idiots. Fascism holds the
whole thing together. In a slave society, people can
end up as property, say when their debts are too high.
Free men find natural to be themselves for sale. All
what matters is who owns whom, not the principle of
selling whoever, or whatever, which is admitted by all,
the essence of any corruption imaginable. FREEDOM, IN
A SLAVE SOCIETY, IS A QUESTION OF WHO OWNS WHOM, NOT
OF BECOMING BETTER MINDS. So it was that Greece ended
up owned by Macedonia, then Rome owned Macedonia, hence
Greece. And dumbness reigned.

Not surprisingly, since it was a man-owns-man world,
the Greeks EQUATED THEIR FREEDOM TO DOMINATING OTHERS.
Not bearing chains meant dominating others, in the slave
world. Here is a telling quote, at the foot of one of
antiquity's most famous monuments:

"The people of Dorian Rhodes raise high to heaven
this colossus ... when they crowned the country with
the spoils of their foes. Not only over the sea but
also over the land they spread the lovely light of UNFETTERED
FREEDOM. For those who spring from the race of Heracles
DOMINION IS A HERITAGE on land and sea." UNFETTERED
FREEDOM MEANT DOMINION. Some quotes from the democratic
assembly of the Athenian people, all the Athenian people,
a modern barbarian such as Adolf Hitler would have never
dared to utter in public, lest he looked unreasonable.

This confusion between freedom and dominating others
led the Greeks to a vicious circle of fascism, and counter
fascism. Athens attacked democratic Beotia for no good
reason, except that Athens was a superpower, and it
was a monopolar world (Athens declared), and Athens
was the land of the free, hence the dominating. Beotia
and Thebes called fascist Sparta for help, the latter
secretly bankrolled by fascist Persia, and, from there
on, things only got more vicious, and more complex.
Athens' preferred line of horror was : "EITHER YOU ARE
WITH US, OR YOU ARE AGAINST US" (repeated by Bush).
Those who were not "WITH" were therefore punished, i.e.,
they were threatened, and then attacked by Athens. Athens
annihilated some democracies, killing all men, making
slaves of all women and children. Soon nearly all Greek
states were fighting Athens. Athens lost. When they
are really hungry, African wild dogs will attack an
isolated lion. It takes a while, but the dogs often
get to eat.

A LESSON UNHEEDED:

Of course the fact that some officials in Washington
repeated exactly the same words as the imbeciles in
Athens' assembly of the people, 25 centuries earlier,
tells a lot about the scary times we are in. At the
very least officials of a modern republic should know
the history of the first large democracy the world has
known. Athens was immense relative to the 200 states
of the Greek world, and still got half annihilated because
of her rogue behavior. The USA is only 4% of the world
population, and just one democracy out of many...

The Athenians did a fatal mistake. So we should have
learned. We are playing with thermonuclear bombs nowadays,
not just triremes with rams. It is DEMOCRATIC Athens'
uncivilized attitude which made Athens the unbalanced
society which destroyed the civilization she could have
led for millennia to come. The lack of appropriate philosophical
capability of the Athenians was at fault. Something
similar happened many times in history, one of the latest
example being brand new Germany, which fell into barbarism,
mostly because of a pervasive, Prussian instigated,
fascist philosophy in which the whole country bathed
(and which revolted great minds such as Nietzsche and
Einstein, who spent most of their lives decrying Germany).

ATHENS' TRAGIC FALL INTO POPULARLY INSTIGATED FASCISM:

Athens, the great Athens of Pericles, the Athens which
gave so much to mankind, had a such very high opinion
of herself that it became intoxicating. Athenian theater
used to deplore hubris in individuals, but Athena herself
was the greatest perpetrator of hubris there ever was,
and this no one dared directly decry (true anyone trying
to do so may have been tried and executed for ... "impiety"!
Aristophane's comedy "The Birds", where Athenians build
a city in the sky, is as close as critique went).

Athens thought of herself as free and just, but Athens
was dictatorial and unjust towards others. After Athens
surrendered, most other Greek states wanted her exterminated
as if it were a vermin, like she used to do to others
(Sparta (!) saved what was left of her). Athenian fascism
towards other nations started innocuously enough: Athens
was the great arsenal of democracy which had won the
wars against Persia, so Athens gave herself special
rights, in her status of self described superpower and
land of freedom. Athens gave herself the right to use
NATO (ooppss, sorry: at the time called the Delian League)
for personal economic and financial advantage. Because
she was the superpower. Of course, Athens, having been
burned by the Persians, had to be rebuilt, but she raided
the Delian treasury, edified a great navy, and very
costly architecture, such as the Parthenon. Those buildings
may be cute, but they also symbolize the civilization
Athens destroyed, and how.

GREEK FASCISM UNFETTERED AS A FAILURE OF THE GREEK
PHILOSOPHICAL VISION:

The great intellectuals of Greece were unable to see
there had been a failure of Greek ethics. They were
not up to snuff. They just did not have the right contextual
dimensions. They were shrunk, low dimensional beings,
soon flattened by the bulldozer of history. As Athens
got nearly annihilated from the world reaction to her
popularly generated fascism, Socrates, a war hero, was
talking about other things, obvious little things, somewhat
related, but having thoroughly missed the big picture,
thus making a fool of himself as a philosopher. NOBODY,
not Plato, nor Aristotle, and nor anyone else of record
in Greco-Roman antiquity, including the Christian philosophers,
had an understanding of the mental forces at work. Plato
and Aristotle extolled fascism, then reluctantly admitted
there was something wrong with this picture, although
they did not know what.

After the unfortunate episode of the Athenian democracy
having fallen into fascism, democracy did not occur
in a great power until the FRENCH revolution of 1789
(when, unfortunately things did not go too well either,
because all the monarchies around attacked, and invaded,
and the French republic quickly had to resort to her
own fascism to survive that pack of dogs...). Contrarily
to legend, the US republic did NOT start as a democracy.
Not at all. FRANCE BECAME THE FIRST LARGE REPUBLICAN
DEMOCRACY SINCE ATHENS. Rome did not quite make it either
(see below). The USA was a joke as a democracy for most
of its first 100 years. About only 1% of the US male
population was allowed to vote, for a few generations.
This would have made the Greeks or the Romans scoff.
In the democracies of antiquity ALL free males could
vote, although the distinction between nobility and
people was kept in Rome. It can be argued that America
became a democracy because it had the French democratic
example below its nose, all the more since the French
republic failed because of a British invasion, something
Americans could readily empathize with (having seen
two of those in 36 years)!

THE DESCENT OF THE WHOLE HELLENISTIC WORLD INTO FASCISM:

The infighting between the Greek democracies left
them weaker than the primitive fascists up north in
Macedonia. Macedonia, not at all a democracy, was not
ruled by consensus, but by ignorance, assassination,
and the phalanx. That combination worked well for Operation
Greek Freedom, conducted by unelected President Philip
of Macedonia (just kidding!). The Macedonian conquest
of Greece was sublimated into the 12 year conquest of
"Asia", all the way to India, by Philip's son Alexander,
a student of Aristotle. This space turned into the "Hellenistic"
world, where large federations and kingdoms ruled, as
they could muster large armies (up to 100,000 men).
The Greek city-states faded in importance, and so democracy
faded, and so did fade what had caused Greek ascendency
to start with, technological INNOVATION. An economic
crisis resulted in Greece, accompanied by drastic inequalities
in wealth distribution (even in Sparta!). Such were
the consequences of the triumph of war and empire as
engines of economy and society. Fascism can be successful
in the short term, doing what it does best, namely war,
invasion, occupation and domination. Ultimately it makes
its own perpetrators stupid, per its very nature, though,
so it always ends up defeated by greater intelligence.

OF THE DOMINANCE OF PHILOSOPHY IN DAILY AFFAIRS:

Some people doubt the relevance of philosophy in daily
affairs. They think of Fleming, and penicillin, of Pasteur,
and his discoveries on transmissible diseases, they
think of many practical schemes, such as wireless, or
TV, or mathematical theorems, and they do not see what
the greatest philosophical schemes have brought us.

Well, they brought us civilization. The discovery
of vaccination by the Turks took only a few decades
to reach the West, and a few centuries to instruct Pasteur's
imagination. To discover why Athens failed, is also
a discovery, just as a protein or a theorem can be a
discovery. The failure of Athens was such a complicated
process, it is taking MILLENNIA TO INSTRUCT OUR IMAGINATIONS.
That is all. The failure of the first large democracy,
Athens, is a weightier lesson than discovering that
some molds kill bacteria, and harder to understand,
because it is not clear all what it killed. The failure
of democracy, and why, is a much less obvious logics
of facts. A less obvious lesson takes more time to understand
and learn. Turkey was a very mentally diverse space,
where thinkers from all over Europe and Asia were encouraged
to come, and do their thing, a bit as Athens was, 20
centuries earlier, and so vaccination was not discovered
there by complete chance.

Most of the discoveries which constitute the backbone
of our world civilization were made in only a FEW states,
in a FEW special times, in very FEW moods. This is because
new knowledge and new wisdom arise only from societies
which are philosophically supreme. Athens was philosophically
supreme for three centuries. Her incredible success
did not extend to the ethics she needed to prevent herself
from becoming mad, so she had to be restrained by force,
and civilization went in full reverse.

GREECE'S "LIBERATOR"; "THE SENATE AND PEOPLE OF ROME"

Meanwhile, the Roman pseudo republic had been expanding,
as it defended itself against various predators, including
the Gauls (who occupied, ransomed, and humiliated Rome,
to their future sorrow). Rome met the Greeks in southern
Italy, helped as they were, by the good king Pyhrrus
and his Indian elephants, and Rome lost a few battles...
But Rome was a pseudo republic in a similar sense to
the American pseudo republic of 1776: Rome had infinite
reserves of farmer-soldiers, disciplined by unfailing
fascism, rewarded by land grants. American soldiers
of 1776 received 100 acres from the US, no less! ...
so they really hated ... Great Britain; The Roman soldiers
got much less from the Roman State, and nothing at all
when the republic collapsed. That made them dependent
upon the spoils their generals could bring. Roman discipline
awed the Greeks: when elephants charged, the disciplined
legions would calmly open up, and let the beasts pass,
wounding and enraging them.

ROME, A PSEUDO REPUBLIC WHICH FAILED TO BECOME A REAL
DEMOCRACY BECAUSE THE ROMAN RICH WAS ALLOWED TO RUN
AMOK:

Rome did not start as a slave society, it became one.
But Rome did not start free, either. This explains why
it ended up in chains: the primal nobility -the Patricians-
advised the Etruscan kings, and then led a revolution
against them. The assembly of the Patricians was the
Senate, and it was no slouch. It lasted more than a
millennium. In 524 CE, the president of the Senate,
Boetius, was the last philosopher of antiquity, as he
waited for execution at the hand of the law of His Gracious
Majesty, the Ostrogoth Theodoric, after a dark conspiracy
(not a detail, because this sorry episode was to lead
to the complete destruction of Italy and Rome at the
hand of the monomaniac superpowerful Christian Roman
emperor Justinian).

The way Rome got started is analogous to what happened
in America 23 centuries later: the rich class took power,
and organized "for ourselves" a republic. Except the
USA started just with rich landowners, whereas Rome
started with a high aristocracy of rich and determined
warriors, the Patricians. Other rich people got ennobled
and allowed to progressively enter the Senate (a model
feodal Europe would duplicate later). The Roman People
was not too keen on this "mixed" Constitution, with
the rich on the very top. The People fought back for
centuries, gaining more and more rights from the Senate,
including the right to the highest offices ("Tribunes
with Consular powers"). It looked, for a few centuries,
as if Rome was on her way to become a genuine democracy,
in the Athenian sense of the term (Post Solon Athens
was a very equalitarian society ... but for the slaves).
That was until the Roman Senate found a convenient enemy
to allow Roman fascism and militarism to rally to high
heavens: Carthage.

HOW WAR, ALL THE TIME, ALL THE WAY, MADE THE HYPER
RICH ROMANS SO RICH THEY DESTROYED THE REPUBLIC:

The wars against Carthage allowed the Roman Senate
to stage a slow motion coup against the Roman people.
It took more than 100 years, but it destroyed the Roman
republic beyond repair. Instead of going in the direction
of what should have been fixed (inequalities in wealth,
power and rights), things went the other way.

Under the guise of national emergency, laws favorable
to the people were rescinded. At the same time laws
against concentration of wealth were also rescinded.
One such ancient law forbade people to own more than
three acres, so that there could be plenty of profitable
small farms; that law was rescinded, allowing the apparition
of giant agribusiness manned by armies of slaves, and,
surprise, surprise, owned by senatorial families. It
helped that the rural populations had to take refuge
in the cities as Hannibal was roaming the countryside,
and paid extravagant rent to the Rich therein said cities;
after the war, the Rich bought the land, and the farmers
ended up in poverty, swelling the cities, living off
state sponsored welfare.

Once again, the Senate had been no slouch: at the
battle of Cannae, the final loss to Hannibal, 80 senators
died fighting. After the disaster, a law was passed,
according to which legionaries were supposed to win
or die (15,000 had escaped Cannae alive; the rest of
the 80,000 elite troops had died that day, victim of
Hannibal's genius). From there on it was all victories,
all the time. A bold counter attack a few years later,
with a Roman landing in Africa, allowed the Romans to
win, and submit Carthage.

But removing Carthage as a military threat was not
enough for the glorious Senate: democracy still threatened
in many places, and democracy threatened concentration
of wealth, the Senate's forte. So the Senate instigated
the darkest conspiracy to exterminate democratic Carthage,
democratic Greece, and democratic Spain. It had to be
a conspiracy, because many of the People of Rome were
not so dumb as not to see what the Roman Rich were up
to: EXTERMINATING DEMOCRACY. Even with the extremely
clever conspiracy in full swing, the Roman People nearly
refused to go along. Democratic Carthage was annihilated
in an atrocious war. At the same time, the Senate ordered
the destruction of socialist Corinth, and the DESTRUCTION
OF ALL THE DEMOCRACIES. As simple as that. The year
was 146 BCE. Numantia survived 13 years, and was annihilated.
Marseilles, Rome's sole ally, was submitted nearly a
century later.

The Roman Senate finally strangled democracy in Rome,
its aim all along. Desperate efforts by some individuals
(Gracchi, Caesar, Cicero) to prevent this resulted in
assassination campaigns. Thousands died.
The mental and civilizational forces at play were not
understood enough to be addressed at the time. It was
first a philosophical failure: politicians could not
refer to pre-existing philosophical works, to get help
and suggestions about what to do. There were none. Socrates'
extensive whining about democracy was not helpful. Caesar,
the Republic's supreme commander, had to invent FRATERNITY
for himself, and by himself. He was misunderstood. Fascism
and slavery were the problems Rome had, and doing without
them would have required a lot of imagination. Rome
did not have the brains. Rome never could bring democracy
to the level of Athens, simply because the rich were
too entrenched (Athenian philosophy had taxed her own
rich into submission during the 6th century BCE). Roman
society had at least four distinct classes; one is even
tempted to speak of castes (although they were not akin
to the racist and nasty set up found in India, the Roman
castes were still a delirious violation of the spirit
of equality).

Conclusion: THOSE WHO USE FASCISM AND SLAVERY WILL
GET THEM NEXT, AND IT WON'T BE PRETTY:

The ethics of treating other people as slaves, or
treating the common people as dirt, or treating other
democracies as disobedient dogs which should be punished,
or treating the world as one's plaything to exploit
and trash, were pervasive in Greco-Roman antiquity.
So we can tell America it was already tried, and it
was a many headed disaster.

Treating other people as slaves, or dirt, treating
other democracies as dogs, dealing with the world as
if it were one's empire, is OUTRAGEOUS in light of what
the human condition is. It brings the RAGE OUT. Human
beings are not wolves to be bossed around by top wolves.
Human beings are intrinsic rebels, and think better
that way. The RAGE was brought OUT, first against Athens,
then against the Roman mind numbing empire, ending in
centuries of coups, civil wars, and fascist counterattacks,
until LITERACY itself died out from terminal Roman Catholic
dictatorship (the coups, and Christianity, were tools
against the rich).

A LACK OF EQUALITY AND FRATERNITY LED TO THE MENTAL
IMBALANCE OF THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD, BRINGING ON STUPEFYING
STUPIDITY.

Neither the Christians, nor their Muslim parrots, changed
anything to this. Fortunately, the Franks appeared,
and made Christianism an instrument for the old German
obsessions with fraternity and equality. That the same
did not happen to Islam explains a lot of things. BREAKING
OUT OF THE ETHICAL LOGJAM OF GRECO-ROMAN ANTIQUITY WAS
NECESSARY TO START THE TRUE NAISSANCE OF ADVANCED CIVILIZATION.